There is a certain irony here as well that this project was considered for actual community ownership by being added to the standard library, but it was decided that it was ineligible due to the LGPL license. Had this been MIT from the start you'd actually be correct about the community having some kind of ownership over how the project is operated, but that isn't the case here, it's not community owned. It's owned by the maintainer, it's their IP broadly and they can do as they wish within that LGPL license, including removing the LGPL licensed code.
Just one question, why maintainer is hell bent on using existing name and removing LGPL and not create an entirely new project by new name and new license (after all this is completely new code... right)?
First reason would be use the "name recall", and second guess would be to do another rug-pull to re-licence under some other conditions.
> It's owned by the maintainer
This is completely in-correct. GPL and variants (FOSS, not OSS) were meant to make software free of "any ownership".
Possibly they're "hell bent" on using the existing name because they've been using that name for their project in their github repository with their pip package that they've been supporting for a decade now. If they chose to make a new name, new package, new repo the current one would simply be abandonware. That's no different from what they're doing now, but with the added benefit of including a mechanism to inform their users of the situation.
You're acting like they've just swooped in in the last week to steal this repo out from under the community, when you have to go back to 2024 to see another person's name in the commits and to 2022 to see another person show up more than once. This one guy has been thanklessly maintaining chardet for years, decided to do a fresh rewrite and decided he'd like to use a different license now that the opportunity is here.
> GPL and variants (FOSS, not OSS) were meant to make software free of "any ownership".
And you're right! Version 6 and earlier is (functionally but not actually) free of "any ownership"! It still exists in this repo and out in the world! You can still personally fork it and make your own LGPL with a version 7 if that's the world you want to live in! If you don't want to use an OSS project using MIT you still have the community non-ownership of that code!
But you're not upset that the new code is MIT, you're upset that the new MIT code is using that name in pip and GitHub, but pip is MIT and GitHub is proprietary! The parts you're mad about were never LGPL! Because reminder! This code works outside of pip! Git is decentralized, this GitHub repository isn't the source of truth! Your fork of version 6 is just as real and valid as the MIT'd version 7! Your fork of version 6 can still be called chardet and will still work and is still community owned! You never had to use this guy's repo and this guy's pip publication! And nobody is entitled to this guy's pip account or GitHub account just because he rewrote the library, the community is entitled to the software and they still have it. This is all 100% valid under even the strictest FOSS license, much less LGPL.
this guy's forked MIT'd version 0 will be as real and valid as version 6 of original chardet.
instead of
> Your fork of version 6 is just as real and valid as the MIT'd version 7!
Supporting for a decade is not a basis for unilateral takeover. In last 3 months there seem to be at least 3 other active contributors, any many dozens in past, who share the copyright on parts (ownership)
> nobody is entitled to this guy's pip account or GitHub account just because he rewrote the library
this guy's also not entitled to takeover what is communal, exactly in the same manner.
You're ignoring the part where the maintainer demonstrated that version 7 isn't a relicense of LGPL work but a complete rewrite based on public domain research and algorithms. That stack overflow article is irrelevant to this situation, and again, versions 6 and before have not been "taken over" they still exist exactly as they did a week ago and are still available to anyone that wants them in full license compliance. LGPL requires the source be made available, not that the source's distribution channels never be used for something else.
Then we are back to... if this is a complete re-write, why not a new name for new code?
I guess it's futile to argue in this circular logic when full picture is not considered and argument are being put forward only for the sake of winning argument. Have a good $time_of_day.
